Can We Still Feed the World Without Gene Technology in 2050?

Newest United Nations projections expect the world population to grow to 9 Billion people by 2050.  To provide sufficient food for these people requires an increase in crop production by at least 50%. Usable agricultural production areas are already at their limits, and therefore we have to significantly improve the yield of our major crop plants.  Maize, wheat, rice, potato and cassava are rich in starch and together they represent more than 85% of the carbohydrate calories consumed worldwide.  People for whom these crops are the primary staple food often suffer from malnutrition because the seeds, tubers and roots of these plants do not contain enough of the necessary vitamins and minerals such as iron for a healthy diet.  Consequently, we must also improve our crops for their nutrient qualities to assure that in the future we can also provide a healthy diet to large and especially economically disadvantaged segments of the world population.  But will it be possible to reach the needed crop yields and nutritional improvements with our current breeding methods and germplasm under rapidly changing climatic conditions and using sustainable agricultural production methods?  Foremost, we must acquire a much better understanding of the genetic changes that many thousand years of breeding have left behind in the genomes of our crop plants.  To meet the challenges of population growth we also have to radically change the way of breeding our crop plants.  In the future we must combine genetic and molecular information about our breeding stocks with modern breeding methods to achieve sustainable crop yield increases and yield stability, and to improve nutritional qualities.  Plant research can make an important contribution to reach this goal.  But it also needs better education of consumers and broader acceptance of modern breeding methods, including gene technology, to meet the challenge of reaching sustainable food security for generations to come.